videos

Preview excerpt from the upcoming documentary, Gran Horizonte: In March of 2012, Urban-Think Tank visited Cape Town to look at the "Blocking Out" program being led by the NGO Ikhayalami and residents of Philippi Township. Originating from the need to incrementally improve both individual housing unit quality and mobility within the dense urban fabric of the community, Blocking Out is an tool for incremental development.

After a fire in March 2009, the community of Joe Slovo rebuilt hundreds of shacks in their settlement, uniting residents and catalyzing a city-wide upgrading process.

After a devastating fire ripped through a section of Cape Town's Khayelitsha township in January, destroying hundreds of homes, another informal settlement shows what can be done to transform residents' lives. Aletta Gardner reports.

The Empower Shack project aims to introduce an integrated approach to the upgrading of South Africa's growing informal settlements, merging design innovation with community-driven spatial planning and livelihoods programming. South Africa continues to experience a housing crisis. With a shortage of over 2.5 million housing units nationwide, approximately 7.5 million people are locked out of the formal property market.

Uploaded by Jeremy Bean on 2013-09-25.

How much courage does it take to convince people to demolish their homes? Meet Nokwezi Klaas, community leader at Mtshini Wam informal settlement in South Africa. Nokwezi took an huge Leap of Faith and did just that.

How much courage does it take to convince people to demolish their homes? In this episode meet Nokwezi Klaas, a community leader, wife and mother who headed up an extraordinary re-blocking and renewal project in her informal settlement just outside Cape Town. Witness her journey and the leaps of faith she had to take to transform her community.

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Meet Andrea Bolnik of SDI Alliance. The organization was named a finalist of the 2013 FT/Citi Ingenuity Awards for its work upgrading informal housing in South Africa. Learn more about their great work.

Construction of two-story-shack for Phumezo Tsibanto and his family. Phumezo is a dweller and community leader in the BT-Section in Khayelitsha and actively took part in the Swisspearl Summer School 2013. In December of 2013, he worked with ETH/U-TT and the local NGO, Ikhayalami, to build a new home for his family.